Artificial Intelligence,Performance Marketing,Social Media Marketing / January 10, 2026 / By : Barbaros Let Them Steal Your IP: Why GenAI Fan Art is the Ultimate Growth Hack The copyright wars are over. The remix wars have begun. Smart brands aren't suing creators; they are hiring them. Inspiration: Scrolling Facebook and seeing a fan-made Batman poster that looked better than the official one, and...
D2C,Halfdays,Lululemon,Markets / January 10, 2026 / By : Barbaros Lululemon Should Acquire Halfdays to Fix Its “Outdoors” Problem Forget MIRROR. This is the acquisition that actually fits the DNA. Lululemon owns the studio; it’s time to own the slopes. Inspiration: Seeing a sea of Halfdays suits in Aspen and realizing Lululemon is completely missing the "Après" demographic.Lululemon is a beast, but they have...
Autonomous Driving,Technology / January 10, 2026 / By : Barbaros Autonomous Driving: It’s Not About the Car. It’s About the Kid in the Back Seat. We are obsessing over the technology. Parents are obsessing over the peace of mind. That is the premium that scales the industry. Inspiration: Reading The Anxious Generation and realizing that for a parent, the "killer app" isn't speed;...
Artificial Intelligence,Technology / January 9, 2026 / By : Barbaros Before We Get AGI, We Need “The Face” Text is efficient. Voice is convenient. But humans are biologically wired to trust only one interface: A Face. Inspiration: Watching my friends ignore a perfect ChatGPT answer, only to watch a 15-minute YouTube video of a guy saying the exact same thing because they trusted...
Defence,Google,Markets,Technology / January 9, 2026 / By : Barbaros Why YouTubers Predict Wars Faster Than CNN The "Official Narrative" waits for the missile to land. The "Analyst Narrative" watches the fuel truck leave the depot. Inspiration: Watching a YouTuber analyze fuel logistics on Google Earth and predicting an invasion three weeks before the "Breaking News" banner appeared on TV.Mainstream news is built on...
Markets,Personal / January 5, 2026 / By : Barbaros Geography is Strategy: Why Where You Build Matters More Than What You Build We love to talk about the "Idea." But a mediocre seed in fertile soil will always beat a perfect seed in concrete. Inspiration: Watching founders struggle to raise $50k in Europe, while a "Uber for Dog Walking" raised $10M in San...
Artificial Intelligence,Technology / January 5, 2026 / By : Barbaros Voice is for Chatting. Text is for Thinking. Everyone wants to talk to "Jarvis." But if you want to actually build something, the keyboard is still the highest-bandwidth interface we have. Inspiration: Realizing that I can’t "speak" a semicolon, and that sometimes, a single comma changes the entire meaning of a thought.The world...
Artificial Intelligence,Personal,Technology / January 4, 2026 / By : Barbaros AI Won’t Give You Purpose. It Will Force You to Find It. We are entering the age of "Cognitive Surplus." You can spend it on dopamine, or you can spend it on the questions you were too busy to ask. Inspiration: The "hole within" described in The Anxious Generation, and realizing that for...
Meta,Technology / January 3, 2026 / By : Barbaros Meta’s $100B Opportunity: Why It Must Kill Salesforce They own the conversation. Now they need to own the transaction. WhatsApp isn't just a chat app; it's the operating system of global business. Inspiration: Watching a $50k deal close entirely on WhatsApp, then imagining the sales rep manually type the data into Salesforce like it's...
Defence,Technology / January 3, 2026 / By : Barbaros The Death of Shadows: How Palantir, Anduril, and BlackSky Killed the Element of Surprise We are building a "Kill Web" that compresses the decision loop from days to seconds. You can’t fight an enemy that sees everything, knows everything, and never sleeps. Inspiration: Realizing that Palantir didn't just invest in BlackSky for returns; they...
Leadership,Personal / December 16, 2025 / By : Barbaros Idols Series: Jim Rohn (The Mentor I Didn’t Know I Knew) I’ve read hundreds of self-help books. It turns out, I was just reading footnotes to Jim Rohn. I care about personal growth. A lot.If you saw my Audible library or my bookshelf, you’d see the usual suspects: Atomic Habits, The 5 AM Club,...
Markets / December 15, 2025 / By : Barbaros Prediction Markets: Insider Traders Providing More Transparency The "news" is slow. The betting markets are instant. And the reason they are so accurate is the one thing we aren't supposed to talk about: Insider Trading. Inspiration: Coffeezilla’s breakdown of how prediction markets are basically unregulated casinos, and watching the GPT-5.2 release date leak on...
Apple,Artificial Intelligence,Google,Meta,Technology / December 15, 2025 / By : Barbaros Meta Made Wearables Socially Acceptable. Who Wins the Industry? Google failed because they built a computer for your face. Meta succeeded because they built sunglasses that happen to have AI. Inspiration: Seeing a cool person wearing Ray-Bans and realizing they were recording me, and realizing I didn't hate it.Remember Google Glass?It was a...
Artificial Intelligence,Meta / December 15, 2025 / By : Barbaros To Win Consumer AI, Meta Should Focus on Language Google organizes the world's information. Meta connects the world's people. In the AI era, the killer app isn't a chatbot; it's a universal translator. Inspiration: Trying to use Google Translate in Southeast Asia and realizing that while it knows the words, it doesn't know...
Markets / December 10, 2025 / By : Barbaros Cryptocurrencies (Stablecoins): The Promise of Decentralization, Only to Boost More Control Cypherpunks wanted to kill the Fed. Instead, they built the infrastructure for the ultimate surveillance state. Inspiration: Realizing that "freedom money" (Tether) is actually the most trackable asset in human history.Ten years ago, crypto was a rebellion.It was run by cypherpunks and libertarians....
Markets / December 9, 2025 / By : Barbaros Best (Anecdotal) Investments I Had? Following the Money I used to read balance sheets. Now, I read the guest lists of private dinners. Inspiration: A throwaway line on the Prof G Podcast about "following the capital, not the earnings," and realizing that valuations are just feelings with math. Disclaimer: None of this is financial...
Gaming / December 8, 2025 / By : Barbaros The Game That Guessed the Drone War: Command & Conquer: Generals In 2003, we thought it was just a game. In 2025, it looks like a documentary. Inspiration: Watching a news clip about drone swarms and realizing I played this exact scenario 20 years ago as the USA faction.Command & Conquer: Generals was released...
Leadership,Markets / December 8, 2025 / By : Barbaros Nuclear War: The Risk That Is Ignored We talk about climate change, AI safety, and pandemics. But we ignore the only risk that can end civilization in 30 minutes. Inspiration: Reading H.R. McMaster’s At War with Ourselves and realizing that "Strategic Ambiguity" is just a fancy word for gambling.We have a blind spot.We obsess...
Leadership,Markets / December 8, 2025 / By : Barbaros Dan Wang & Alice Han: Finally, Some Reliable Experts on China In a world of geopolitical noise, these two voices cut through the propaganda with something rare: actual insight. Inspiration: Realizing that 99% of "China Analysis" I read is either Washington hawks selling fear or Beijing bureaucrats selling fantasy.Trying to understand China today is...
Artificial Intelligence,Markets,Microsoft,OpenAI / December 8, 2025 / By : Barbaros Microsoft Could Save OpenAI (But They Won’t) It looks like a partnership. It acts like a dependency. In reality, it is a slow-motion acquisition. Inspiration: Satya Nadella's calm demeanor during the OpenAI coup, and the old Microsoft playbook: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish."November 2023. The Board fires Sam Altman. Chaos ensues.Satya Nadella didn't panic. He...
Leadership,Markets,Personal / December 8, 2025 / By : Barbaros Vietnam: The Upcoming Star of the Next Century While its neighbors are fighting stagnation, tourism traps, or demographic collapse, Vietnam is quietly becoming the factory—and the code—of the future. Inspiration: My recent trip to Vietnam, seeing young developers coding in cafes while Thai streets were packed with tourists.Walking through Ho Chi Minh City feels...
Apple,Artificial Intelligence,Google,Technology / December 7, 2025 / By : Barbaros The Future of iPhones Depends on Google Apple Intelligence is good at privacy, but bad at thinking. To save the iPhone upgrade cycle, Apple just outsourced its brain to Google. Inspiration: Realizing that "Siri" is still dumb after 14 years, and my iPhone 13 Pro feels exactly the same as the iPhone 16.Apple...
Markets,Technology / December 7, 2025 / By : Barbaros Affinity: Final Nail on the Adobe Coffin Canva just made professional design free. Adobe is buying SEO tools to survive. The king is dead. Inspiration: The growth of Figma in the recent years. How easy it was to transition from Photoshop to Affinity. The acquisition of SEMRush.For decades, Adobe wasn't just a software company....
Artificial Intelligence,Google,Technology / December 7, 2025 / By : Barbaros Understanding (and Perhaps Fixing) Climate Change with AI: Google WeatherNext 2 We finally have a tool that can simulate the planet faster than the planet can change. This isn't just a weather forecast; it's a survival engine. Inspiration: Watching the Google WeatherNext 2 announcement and realizing it was tagged "Climate Change" for a...
Artificial Intelligence,Google,Meta,Performance Marketing,Social Media Marketing,Technology / December 3, 2025 / By : Barbaros Ad Personalization Will Improve: Born In The Internet Era The cookie is dead. Long live the conversation. Why the next generation of ads won't just know what you clicked—they'll know who you are. Inspiration: Realizing that AI assistant knows more about your son's development milestones than his pediatrician does.For the...
Markets,Technology / December 3, 2025 / By : Barbaros Throwing Money at a Problem vs. Innovating: Why Saudi Arabia Refuses to Follow the U.S. Model You can buy Nvidia H100s, but you can't buy a culture of innovation. The "Giga-Projects" are beautiful, expensive distractions from the real work. Inspiration: The news that NEOM is being scaled back (after burning billions) and the realization...
Gaming,Technology / November 30, 2025 / By : Barbaros Steam Machine: Windows is in Trouble The OS war isn't over; it just changed battlefields. Valve is doing what Microsoft refused to do: building a console that is actually a PC. Inspiration: The realization that my "gaming PC" is just a glorified console that forces me to deal with Windows updates.We thought it was...
Markets,Technology / November 30, 2025 / By : Barbaros Prediction Markets: Retail Investors Will Switch to Gambling The stock market is boring. The new casino is pricing "Truth," and it's about to eat the world. Inspiration: Watching the Polymarket chart during the election and realizing it was more accurate (and addictive) than CNN.While everyone was busy watching Nvidia stock charts, a quiet revolution...
Artificial Intelligence,Markets,Technology / November 30, 2025 / By : Barbaros AI Will Change Recruiting (But Not How You Think) The resume is dead. The future of hiring is your AI agent talking to their AI agent while you sleep. Inspiration: Seeing brilliant friends stuck in mediocre jobs simply because they are bad at "self-marketing," and realizing that the best candidates are rarely the...
Artificial Intelligence,Personal,Technology / November 30, 2025 / By : Barbaros Using AI for Personal Growth: Let It Get to Know You Stop treating AI like a search engine. Start treating it like a mirror that remembers everything you forget. Inspiration: The moment I asked my AI to roast my life choices, and it gave better advice than my therapist.For years, my relationship with...
Uncategorized / November 30, 2025 / By : Barbaros Anduril & Palantir: The Duo That Will Establish US Dominance It’s not just about better drones or smarter software. It’s about rewriting the operating system of war to solve a problem that broke the US military in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Inspiration: The speeches of Sarah Paine and Palmer Luckey, and the timeless strategies of...
Leadership,Markets,Social Media / November 28, 2025 / By : Barbaros Sarah (Sally) C. M. Paine: The Historian That is About to Get Internet Popular She doesn't have a Twitter account. She doesn't have a podcast. But she is about to become the most important voice on your feed. Inspiration: My track record of spotting figures like Prof G, Alex Hormozi, and Palmer Luckey...
Artificial Intelligence,Markets / November 28, 2025 / By : Barbaros AI is Going to be the Black Swan Event for AI (CapEx and Valuations) We are building a $1 trillion infrastructure on the assumption that everyone needs an Nvidia GPU. What happens when Google proves you don't? Inspiration: The quiet panic in Jensen Huang’s recent tweets, and the realization that "proprietary" hardware might...
Artificial Intelligence,Google,Markets,Meta,OpenAI,Technology / November 27, 2025 / By : Barbaros The AI Race: The Best Bait for Attracting Capital The "China Threat" isn't just a geopolitical reality. It is the single most effective slide in a Silicon Valley pitch deck. Inspiration: Jensen Huang and Sam Altman on every news channel, and the peculiar reason why China bans Google.Let’s look at the scoreboard.In 2024,...
Artificial Intelligence,Google,Meta,Performance Marketing,Technology / November 27, 2025 / By : Barbaros First BFCM with GenAI: Ad Creative Strategy in 2025 The tools finally caught up to the hype. This year, we didn't just "play" with AI; we built our entire Black Friday strategy on it. Inspiration: Early performance surprises and the realization that I could generate 50 high-quality ad variants in the time...
/ / By : Uncategorized / November 26, 2025 / By : Barbaros Google: Rebranding is Inevitable "Googling" is dying. To survive the Agentic Age, the world's biggest search engine needs to stop being a search engine. Inspiration: The confusion of explaining "Gemini for Workspace" to my mom, and the sheer brilliance of Mark Zuckerberg’s "Meta" pivot.Remember when Facebook became Meta?Everyone laughed. "It's...
/ / By : The markets yawned at Ukraine. Now they are sleeping on Taiwan. But the "Silicon Shield" isn't just about chips—it's about a timeline that ends in 2027. Inspiration: The market's dangerous desensitization to war, Anduril's internal "China 27" roadmap, and the peculiar delays in Arizona.Remember when the Ukraine war started? The markets crashed. Panic was everywhere.Now? A missile strike is...
Artificial Intelligence,Technology / November 22, 2025 / By : Barbaros Excited About the Next Generation of Workforce: The AI-Native We worried that Millennials were glued to screens. We worried Gen Z was addicted to TikTok. Now, we should worry if we can keep up with the generation that treats intelligence as a utility. Inspiration: The "Intern" who runs the corporate Twitter account, and...
Uncategorized / November 21, 2025 / By : Barbaros Nano Banana Pro: Everyone Can Be a Content Creator The barrier to entry just dropped to zero. If you have an idea and a keyboard, you are now a creative agency. Inspiration: The death of the $500 web banner and my friends becoming video game characters.Let's have an honest conversation about the first wave...
/ / By : Why the real news from Meta Connect isn't just a camera. It's the beginning of the real-world Iron Man UI. Inspiration: World of Warcraft addons, Iron Man's Jarvis, and the Anduril EagleEye military targeting system.So, Meta Connect just happened.Everyone is talking about the new Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses (Gen 2 and the new "Display" model) and the Oakley Vanguard...
Uncategorized / November 2, 2025 / By : Barbaros Title: P-Time and M-Time: The 60-Year-Old Concept That Affects the Fate of Your Company (and Even Your Country) Your view of time is not universal. It’s the most powerful—and invisible—force dictating your success, your stress, and your nation's GDP. Inspiration: How people do things (both professional and personal) very, very differently between cultures.If you...
/ / By : Shopify: The Inevitable Journey to the S&P 500 Inspiration: The tensions that began to develop between CRA and Shopify.While none of this is financial advice, my prior bets on Uber and Palantir showed the power of index inclusion.So, we are going to talk about how Shopify's growing tension with the CRA may be the catalyst that forces a U.S....
/ / By : Ozempic This. Ozempic That. Inspiration: The Economics of Insurance, Marginal Revolution Podcast.By the time I am writing this (October 2025), I am going to assume you were not living under the rock and heard about new drugs like Ozempic at least once.Maybe it was on the news.Maybe it was at a restaurant, chatting with friends.Or your favourite celebrity allegedly...
Uncategorized / October 22, 2025 / By : Barbaros OpenAI’s “Atlas” Can’t Disrupt Google Chrome. But The Next Platform Shift Will. $500B in valuation by the way, ladies and gentlemen... Inspiration: Earlier conversations on Threads and now, OpenAI introducing ChatGPT Atlas.It's almost like the market did not learn from its past, but hey, maybe this could create another buying opportunity.Today, OpenAI introduced ChatGPT...
Uncategorized / October 19, 2025 / By : Barbaros The Winner of the US-China Tariff War? The Global South There is always an opportunity in every conflict. Inspiration: China Decode podcast, How Labubus Explain China’s Global ReachYou might be asking yourself, "why would a performance marketer write about global trade".In most circumstances, you would be correct.But, once you get to a point at...
Performance Marketing,Personal,Social Media Marketing / September 29, 2025 / By : Barbaros Best Thing You Can Do For Your Marketing Career: Work On A Good Product (Not A Good Brand) If you are in marketing, you should work for a weak brand with a great product – rather than a great brand with a weak product. Get ready to hear the explanation on...
Uncategorized / September 25, 2025 / By : Barbaros The Unhinged Corporate Social Media Playbook: Zaria Parvez The Mastermind Social Media Manager Generating Billions in Market Cap Inspiration: Following Zaria's journey over the years and her latest writing of reflecting on her growth.This one is going to be a little different than usual.Rather than an opinion piece, it will be a semi-serious analysis...
Google,Technology / September 16, 2025 / By : Barbaros Tariffs: The Biggest Threat to YouTube Smart TVs Fueled YouTube's Living Room Takeover, right? Inspiration: Your TV remote sitting next to you.First of all, let's make it clear that this is not a political post that trashes tariff policy, or taken by an international commerce expert.Once again, this is a performance marketer who is...
Artificial Intelligence,Google,Technology / September 11, 2025 / By : Barbaros Google AI/Gemini Will Help Google Win the Wearables Space: Pixel Watch Leapfrogs Thanks to Google AI/Gemini and Personalized Health Coach, Google will win the wearables space Inspiration: Several attempts by Apple Fitness+ to monetize, my own need for such an agent, and the announcement of the Apple Watch 11.Alright. I wasn't going to...
Uncategorized / September 9, 2025 / By : Barbaros Best Way to Work with AI: Talk to It Like a Friend Best Way to Work with AI (From a Performance Marketer and SEO Expert's Perspective) Inspiration: How people used to call the way I write as Grammarly, and my odd talent for SEO without any prior training.Alright, let's get it rolling.Before we get...
Performance Marketing,Personal / September 4, 2025 / By: Barbaros If You Want To Be Great In Marketing: You Don’t Work 9 to 5 If You Want to Be Great in Marketing: You Don't Work 9 to 5 Inspiration: Mark Zuckerberg's personal branding revamp, Donald Trump's podcast appearances, and Elon Musk being chronically online. The title basically says it all.If you want to be a...
Personal / August 13, 2025 / By : Barbaros Writing. But Why Now? Are blogs even cool anymore? Inspiration: Paul Graham's Essays and Scott Galloway's discipline for writing.Time and time again, the same quote shows up in front of me: the brain is made for creating ideas, not keeping them.Perhaps it is handling many brands and ideas at once, or the biology that...
COPYRIGHT © BARBAROSOZTURK.COM 2025. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
